Search Results: Ian C. Smith

Fr Frank Brennan SJ's paper 'Reflections on the death penalty on the tenth anniversary of the Bali Bombings' presented at the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and Australians Against Capital Punishment Dinner, Red Hill, Brisbane, 12 October 2012, Commemorating the 10th World Day Against the Death Penalty.

One curate in our parish claimed to dream about the royal family and believed everyone did. Any easy familiarity I had with an idealised royal family collapsed with the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Malcolm Turnbull is persuasive when he says in Australia there are now more Elizabethans than monarchists.

The Titanic has become the symbol of the end of a swaggering era marked by great self-confidence and belief in inevitable progress. It suggests that whenever swagger begins to walk the streets it is time to head for the lifeboats. We find it hard to apply this lesson to the circumstances of our own times.

The priests are ineluctably compromised: one has capitulated to state pressure to marry; the other has fathered a daughter and drugs himself with alcohol. But the author's achievement, and a mark of his faith, is his ability to 'distinguish ... between the man and the office'.

Despite Obama's insistance that the use of drones in Pakistan 'is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists', civilian casualties are inevitable. Australia is also phasing in the use of drones.

If Rudd was re-installed as leader, Howard's Lazarus impersonation and Menzies' return to office in 1949 would have been outdone by the most remarkable twist ever in Australian politics. Only insiders know whether it might happen. Only voters know whether it might work.

As a teenager in Britain I thought Catholic clergy were a pure and undefiled lot, while their Protestant counterparts were hopelessly scandalised. The source of this information? The News of the World. I'm ashamed to admit I was once myself seduced into writing for this unrepentant scandal ship.

While Victorian Attorney-General Robert Clark pushes for tougher treatment of young offenders, his NSW counterpart Greg Smith is looking to Victoria's current 'enlightened' model, which favours early intervention over punishment.

We now know that, in the name of the US alliance, our Government attempted to scuttle the significance of the UN Convention on Cluster Munitions. Thus far the Greens are the only party to take the point, and the only party in full sympathy with the Vatican on this issue.